These stories are ingenious and delightfully written. Often with a hint of the golden age mistresses of Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie, Eccles depicts the dilemmas of the apparently law abiding with a humorous eye. For example, Sayers’s device of the twice used grave from The Nine Tailors comes in handy for a war time disappearance in ’Journey’s End’ and forties set ’Peril at Melford House’ has the jolly atmosphere of one of Marsh’s camp country house stories. In fact a number of the stories turn upon the second world war or its aftermath.
Yet the abiding impression of the collection is one of variety in tone and
structure as well as setting. There is a beautifully shaped story set in the
siege of Mafeking a century or more ago, in which an honourable man is duped
by a designing woman and the device of withholding the knowledge of the focal
character is used expertly. Another story takes the big country house into the
cash-strapped present in the eyes of an art historian set to appraise it for
a grant application. Murders occur, as is proper, mainly off stage. Past iniquities
are unearthed with justice achieved mostly, either through official police intervention
or by those both morally and actively implicated. Selfishness and petty persecutions
often invite huge retribution or are the inadequate motives themselves for attacks.
In ‘Anne Hathaway Slept Here’, the relatively minor sins of a grasping elderly
woman are behind both her own death and what made her a killer years ago. Her
life of crime begins in murder and progresses to maligning her neighbour’s businesses
and maybe poisoning a few cows. A typical country village scene, in fact - in
crime fiction. I highly recommend this thrilling and engrossing collection.
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Susan Rowland
Marjorie Eccles is the author of the Gil Mayo books of which there are fifteen
books in the series.